Gazzaniga announces NIDA full of soup, but wants $millions more

Science, Jan. 24, 1997, p.459

Brain, Drugs, and Society

by Michael Gazzaniga

It was at a symposium on the cognitive neuroscience of drug abuse that the idea came to me: Scientists need to speak out about the total problem of drug use. Excitement was in the air at this meeting; the National Institute on Drug Abuse (NIDA) had finally acknowledged that cognition--a person's beliefs and goals--plays a role in drug abuse. NIDA announced that it would now fund research in this area. That was the good news; the bad news was that Uncle Sam was only offering $1.5 million for the enterprise.

Until now, drug abuse research has been dominated by simple behavioral models that use outmoded theories of reinforcement to explain drug addiction, such as the mistaken notion that users stay addicted because drugs provide an intermittent schedule of reward. Neuroscience took up such ideas, and the field largely became locked into the view that if it could be determined exactly what neurotransmitter responds to what drug, the drug addiction problem would be solved. NIDA now seems to have recognized that these ideas have only limited utility and has invited cognitive neuroscientists to participate in the hunt for a deeper understanding of drug abuse.

Does it take a cognitive neuroscientist to comprehend how "cognition -- a person's beliefs and goals" -- influences drug use? I've been working on that one for 25 years -- without a cent from the NIDA. And I've gotten pretty far on it too. Not that the NIDA is interested in that. Now the NIDA's (and NIMH's) big push is "the" neurochemistry of addiction. They're sure they're going to really solve addiction this time, unlike the last fifty or so years of pharmacological, neuroscientific, and behavioral research.

Gazzaniga's assessment -- "Since 1982, the federal budget for drug control programs has gone from $650 million to over $13 billion. What has been the effect?" -- applies equally well to the stuff the NIDA has wasted its ever-bloatening budget on. "Yet the government thinks it is newsworthy that $1.5 million will be applied to what is probably the central issue in human drug addiction. This is a silly amount." And what has kept the NIDA from diverting more -- or any -- of its massive budget over the last several decades to the "central issue in human drug addiction"? They've been busy wasting their money in their ignorance that this is the case. Why give them more?